Writing

Tips for Camp NaNoWriMo

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If you didn’t already know, the first session of Camp NaNoWriMo begins this Friday. Camp NaNoWriMo is about the same as regular NaNoWriMo, just in the summer, and there are two sessions (The other one being in August). The goal is to write a complete 50,000+ word manuscript in 30 days or less.

My second manuscript is a product of National Novel Writing Month, and I’ve attempted every session since. I’m going to give some advice to those new to or curious about the process.

NaNoWriMo is a prompt. Its main purpose is to prompt those who otherwise wouldn’t write into doing so, but if you’re already a writer (or even if you aren’t) NaNoWriMo can still come in handy. It’s a lot of fun and adds a little bit more to the writing experience.

Don’t take it too seriously. It’s not about winning or losing, and really there’s no way to lose. Say you pass the 50k word mark, but it took you two months to get there. Who cares? You wrote a book, didn’t you? How is that anything but winning?

Don’t be afraid to fail the deadlines or break the rules. For Camp last year I had an idea I was kicking around, and I decided to wait about a month and a half for Camp to start to begin work on it. It turned out the project didn’t go where I thought it would, and I ended up scrapping it and now I plan to start over. I love my idea, but because I waited so long to start I didn’t realize until it was too late that it wouldn’t go as planned, and because of the word count I tried to force it out anyway. I ended up with a huge mess. Needless to say, I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo that time. I would have been far better off starting the project as soon as I felt ready and taking the time it needed me to take. I still would’ve failed NaNoWriMo, but I might have had something to show for it.

A friend of mine started a project last November and got a few thousand words in, and while he continues his project, he definitely didn’t meet the deadline. I told him about Camp and he expressed concern that it’s against the rules to continue an old project. I told him it would be better to participate anyway, despite being disqualified from the beginning. Again, it’s better to be disqualified and have a finished book than to not attempt it and have nothing.

Remember to have fun. If it stops being fun, if it feels like your project isn’t going the right way because you’re caught up in rules and deadlines, just take a step back and decide whether continuing with NaNoWriMo is the right way to go. After my Camp fiasco last year, I was able to identify when the same thing was happening to a different project in November. I didn’t hesitate to give up on NaNoWriMo, and come January I had a novella I was a lot happier with than I would have been if I had forced it out a few weeks prior.

With that all said, I’ll be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this year. You can follow my progress via my page here, and I’ll also try to update my blog with how it’s going. What about you? Are you participating this year? Do you have any advice for NaNo newcomers and veterans? Care to share your Camp profile page? Leave a comment.

Script Frenzy

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I’m in the mood for trying something new, so I signed up for this year’s Script Frenzy (http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/). I’ve never written a screenplay before but it seems like fun. I’ll be basing my script on one of my manuscripts as a way to approach the story from a different angle. I guess I have until April 1st to learn the basics of script writing.

A quick note: I recently passed the 10,000 word mark on my latest manuscript. I’m feeling good about this story.

On Big Words

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This is a screenshot I took from my iPod. The app is the official dictionary.com app, which I highly recommend. I love the word of the day section they do, and I have a list of favorites that I pulled from there.

However, I rarely get to use them. I tried once, and guess which word was the only one I had test readers complain they didn’t understand?

Sometimes you can say in one word something that might otherwise take more, but that isn’t a good trade off if nobody knows what your one word means. If your reader has to put down your book and pick up a dictionary in order to progress, you’re in trouble. I’m not saying “don’t ever use big or unconventional words” but if you can keep it simple, do so. Sometimes you can make a word clear from the context, and if you can that’s great, but keep in mind sometimes that just adds fluff. Consider:

She might have had a lot of friends had she not been so farouche.

What does “farouche” mean? Ugly? Stinky? Prone to being a big fat jerk? It’s not entirely clear from this sentence alone.

Well, “farouche” basically means “chronically shy”. This is the word that made my test readers raise an eyebrow. The page it was on talked a lot about a character being shy, but the particular paragraph in which it appeared didn’t (save for “farouche” itself). If you’re going to use context as a clue, it might be best to keep the context as close to the word in question as possible. Don’t, however, do something like this:

She might have had a lot of friends had she not been so farouche. She found it hard to talk to people because she was so shy.

The reason I say this is a no-no is because you now have two sentences that basically mean the exact same thing. This isn’t so much context as it is using a sentence to define another sentence, which I’d consider fluff. Incidentally, I’d probably change that sentence to:

She found it hard to talk to people, and she might have had a lot of friends otherwise.

I got rid of “shy” entirely because that’s pretty much what it means to find it hard to talk to people. This sentence doesn’t really show as much as it tells, but it does tell a lot in a few words. For example, since we’re told she might have friends otherwise, we can infer she’s probably a pretty cool person, she’s just shy. It does all of this without making the reader pick up a dictionary.

Don’t use big or unconventional words just for the sake of using them. If you’re a writer, words are the only thing you have to convey what you want to other people, and unless you’re writing only for yourself, it does you no good if those words aren’t understood by anybody.

Stumped!

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I think all of us as writers have reached that dreaded brick wall. You’re writing your heart out, the story is rolling, everything is going fine, and suddenly you stop. You just can’t move.

What do you do?

Here are some ways I cope with being stumped.

Let’s talk about being stumped within a story. What happens when there’s a boulder in the path? A sandbar in the sea? A locked door in the haunted mansion?

Take a step back. Remember these two things:

1. At any given time, you’re probably only half as clever as you think you are.

What I mean by this is often that plot twist you just have to have might be what’s holding you back. That clever back-and-forth dialogue currently marking the end of your page, the wrong path your character took that suddenly doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, the evil twin from the shadowy past come back to rear his ugly head, sometimes that’s what’s blocking you. If you present a conflict and there’s just no resolution, get rid of that conflict. Focus on what you were writing originally. Chances are, if you introduced some spur-of-the-moment thing and can’t figure out where to go after, that’s why. Your clever little sidetrack might end up derailing your piece overall, and if so, what good is it? Cut it out. Yeah, it hurts, but not as much as not getting anywhere at all. Take a step back, assess what’s really important, cut what isn’t, and you might find your path is a little wider than it looked and you might just find the footing you need to keep going.

2. If you’re stuck, make that a part of your story.

I recall a time I was writing a certain story and I had no idea where to go. My characters had not resolved the main conflict (they hadn’t even discovered it yet) and they were safe and everything was just peachy. Boring, right? I felt like I was at a brick wall. And that was the solution. I literally had my characters reach a brick wall, forcing them to take a different path, one that led right into the main conflict of the story.

If you’re stumped, stump your characters. Just throw a wrench in their gears and see what they do. Sometimes your characters know more about where to go than you do.

This sounds like the opposite of what I said before, and in a way it is. The truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to problems in writing. The trick is to know which will work for you. If you throw your characters a curve and you write five pages and then get stuck, go back and get rid of the curve. Try a different path, make a different decision. Have them reach that brick wall and go right instead of left. Have them find a way to climb over it.

In other words, try different things. Don’t be so attached to your writing that you fear pressing the backspace key. The backspace key can be your best friend and sometimes your story’s savior. If you think so highly of your writing that you can’t delete a word you wrote, you probably shouldn’t be writing anyway.

Sometimes you don’t get stuck until after you’ve finished writing. This is the problem I’m currently having. My friend and I have a manuscript sitting at 230,000 words. It’s just too darn long for unpublished writers. It’s easy for us to sit there and justify it (two writers equals twice the length, right?) but that doesn’t do us any good. Our opinions on it don’t matter; an agent’s opinion does. Arguing about it won’t get the book published.

So we have a dilemma. Like I said, sometimes that road block comes after you’ve finished your manuscript. Maybe your publisher wants you to delete your favorite scene, maybe your agent thinks your book should be in first person when you wrote it in third. There’s a time for standing up for what you think is right, and there’s a time for discussion, but there’s also a time to concede you might be wrong. Again, take a step back, look at the big picture. Of course you love your manuscript the way it is. You wrote it. Yeah, it feels like someone is coming into your house and telling you how to dress your child (or, more accurately, how to re-arrange their limbs). But give it a shot. Sometimes you don’t know how wrong you are until you see how right someone else is.

That’s all well and good for people who have it from the horse’s mouth, but it’s more difficult when this problem is keeping you from getting an agent or a publisher in the first place. We’ve gone through about a dozen rejection letters, all form, except for one agent who helpfully let us know our manuscript was just too long.

It’s devastating to find out, it really is. We decided to cut our story in half. We had seven viewpoint characters, we cut it down to three and a half and tied off the loose ends. We have a good length going now, but a test reader informed us it doesn’t feel like a complete story anymore.

Back to square one.

I don’t have a solution yet, but I’m working on it. So I’d like to mention a few of the things I do to try to look at a situation from different angles. The answer is there, I just have to find it, and you won’t see anything different if you don’t look at it another way.

Often when I’m stumped (in either of the fashions mentioned) I’ll step away from the story. I’ll go for a walk, or perform some remedial task, like doing the dishes or vacuuming or rearranging my underwear drawer. There’s an episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon takes on remedial tasks to occupy his mind while he searches for an answer to a theoretical problem, and it works for him. It works for me too, and it can work for you. Often when I have some impassible problem, I’ll have a solution within ten minutes of doing one of these tasks. If you’re like me and you live with your parents and writing is your job, you’ll probably be helping them out and keeping them from going crazy for another few days in the process.

Take a step back. Take a deep breath. Look at it from any and every point of view. Try something that sounds like it’ll never work. Try something you have a hunch will. There’s a solution, and it won’t always be easy, but it’s there. You might have to do a lot of searching, but it’s there.

Your turn. What do you do when you’re stumped?

Music While You Write

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I often listen to music while I write. Usually I’ll make a playlist of songs that fit the mood I’m going for in my writing (and I’ve considered posting these playlists before, what do you think?). Over time I’ve moved away from my usual listening while writing, and I definitely don’t recommend listening while editing, or at least listen to something with no words. The reason for both is that if I’m tempted to sing along, that requires my brain to write one thing and speak another, and the two can get confused. It doesn’t happen often but is just not worth the risk. When it comes to editing, I tend to prefer silence. I often edit aloud (and you should too, sometimes you’ll catch things you didn’t catch just reading). But when it comes to writing, music can be very inspiring.

At the moment I’m working on a fantasy story. My music of choice right now is Joe Hisaishi’s incredible soundtracks to the Studio Ghibli movies (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away etc.). Another fantasy favorite of mine is Yuki Kajiura, specifically her soundtracks for .hack//SIGN and Tsubasa Chronicle. While writing horror I might stick more to Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill soundtracks. I haven’t written hard science fiction in a while, but Yuki Kajiura’s music would fit sci-fi just as well as it fits fantasy.

A common thread you’ll probably notice is that a lot of these are soundtracks. They’re music made to be in the background, to enhance something else going on. This works very well for writing.

I love Rage Against the Machine as much as the next guy, but Zack de la Rocha screaming “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” doesn’t make me feel like writing about dragons. It might, however, keep me in the right mood to write a frantic zombie shootout scene. It’s all about the mood you’re going for, and if you get it wrong, music might just be more of a distraction than inspiration.

These are of course my own musings, and what works for me may not work for you (but if you think it might, go ahead and try it). So what about you? What do you listen to while you write? I’d love to hear about it.

Writing Tip (On Progressive Comparison)

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Normally when I post these tips, they are the accumulation of study I’ve done (I try to draw from at least two different respectable sources when deciding grammar) as well as my own sense of how the language works. Today’s is a little bit more of the latter, as I haven’t found many sources talking about this.

What I’m referring to as progressive comparison are phrases like “more and more” and “higher and higher”.

My general thinking is that they are redundant. But they aren’t always, and these can get tricky.

To be perfectly honest, seeing phrases like that just plain irk me. But lots of things irk lots of people, and sometimes for no good reason. That said, there are perfectly acceptable cases of this language. Consider:

The balloon went higher and higher.

Higher and higher they soared.

I would consider the first phrase to be redundant, and the second to be more acceptable. The reason is in the “went”. If they “went” higher, this implies a progressive motion, so the second “higher” only serves to establish what has already been established. The second sentence does not have this, and “higher they soared” both sounds like a fragment and draws no comparison, rendering it incomplete.

Of course, much of this is my own opinion. I would read “The balloon went higher” and infer the same meaning as “The balloon went higher and higher” unless some other point of reference were drawn:

The balloon went higher than the clouds.

If no other point of reference is present, I can usually safely assume the balloon is going higher than itself, which is to imply a progressive motion.

Obviously, it isn’t always this easy:

More ducks crossed the road.

More and more ducks crossed the road.

The first phrase might leave me wondering “more ducks than what crossed the road?” where the second implies a chain of ducks, which is the meaning I wished to convey. There does exist a safety net though, in that usually that question is answered by the context of the sentence:

A line of ducks started across the road, and he slowed the car and finally stopped. More ducks crossed the road, and he waited patiently.

With the context, we can once again draw a point of reference. More ducks crossed the road than were already crossing the road, thus “more and more” looks redundant.

In my experience, that context is almost always there, so I almost always change a progressive comparison to use only one instance of the word. I also find that the writing comes off smoother and less redundant overall, and possibly a little less cliché.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Know of a grammar journal that proves me wrong? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Writing Tip (On Qualifiers)

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Qualifiers can be tricky, and whether they are effective depends on the use. That is, there’s no clear-cut “always use” or “never use” rules. But in editing my own writing, I find I often use them improperly.

What is a qualifier?

A qualifier precedes a noun and gives a sense of degree. In “The car was sort of red” the qualifier would be sort of. This particular line works well enough in dialogue and subjective narration, but overall, there’s not much place for it in objective narration. All that does is make the writer sound unsure. Was the car red or not? What is “sort of” red, does it mean pink? Orange? Make up your mind, writer!

Consider how drastically the following qualifiers change the narration:

He was kind of tired, so he went to sleep.

She shrieked as the man plunged the knife somewhat hard into her chest.

The bullet flew pretty close to his head.

Now without the qualifiers:

He was tired, so he went to sleep.

She shrieked as the man plunged the knife into her chest.

The bullet flew close to his head.

Now, these aren’t perfect, but they’re much stronger. In the case of the last, the qualifier was almost more of a placeholder. How close? Personally I’d change this sentence to “The bullet flew so close to his head he could hear the wind ripping by his ear” or something of the like. But again, this isn’t an always-and-never issue. For example, if you write “He woke up at seven A.M. every day” your character will likely come off as obsessive, possible pedantic, where “He usually woke up around seven A.M.” implies a more laid-back, casual character. The trick then is to know what you want to convey and just write that. Don’t write what you kind of want to, don’t tell a story close to what you mean, just write what you want to write, and use qualifiers as part of the process, not placeholders (as I often do) or worse, for lack of better words.

Writing Tip (On Humility)

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I last sent a query letter on January 25th. Boy, do I regret it. And all of the other ones I’ve sent.

In the past week I’ve come to realize something about myself: My query letters are terrible.

I’ll be honest. I think I’m a good writer. Or at least I have the potential to be. I think most writers probably think that way. The trick is to not get caught up in it.

It doesn’t matter how good you think you are. You have something to learn. I thought my writing was good and my query letters would automatically be good as well, so I looked up a few and then started sending off my own.

I had the form more or less right. But that’s not the important part. I was describing things in great detail, adding in too many characters, summing up  my book in themes and morals. That’s not how it works.

I learned what I was doing wrong from a variety of sources. The awesome folks at the Query Tracker forum were the first clue that I had it all wrong. Then I read Elana Johnson’s blog and e-book on querying. These two were enough to get me on the right track, I think. Now I’m in the process of reading the entire catalog of Query Shark posts. I’m going to finish those, but already I can see a few more tweaks I need to make to my query letters, and I won’t be sending any more until all of this is finished.

I sent out queries to some agents I really would’ve liked to work with. I think I killed my chances by sending them crappy queries. Some humility could’ve spared that. I thought I was a good writer and I looked up some blogs on query structure, and I made the assumption that that was enough. It wasn’t. Now I’m going to make sure I have a top-notch query letter before I send out any more. Lesson learned.

While reading through the Query Shark pages, I started to notice something. A lot of times, a query will get a response along the lines of “don’t do this” and in the revision, that same exact phrase will be present and followed by another “don’t do this”. Nothing says “I can’t write” like thinking your writing is so good you can just ignore someone telling you otherwise. Especially someone who actually works in the industry. This isn’t to say that you should bow to every hint and suggestion you ever get; sometimes people have the best intentions but they just don’t know your manuscript and their suggestion just doesn’t work (and if you find yourself writing off every bit of advice as such, chances are you’re either doing a terrible job of summing up your manuscript, or worse, you can’t write). But if you notice a lot of people asking the same questions or taking issue with the same phrasing, then there’s something you need to look at.

Of course, much of this can be avoided by doing the right amount of work at the beginning. In my case, I should’ve read the entire archive of Query Shark instead of just a few blogs on structure. I should’ve headed over to the Query Tracker forum and at the very least read other people’s posts and responses to them (or better yet, posted my own for feedback).

Writing is work. Don’t ever assume your writing is so good that you don’t have to work to get it right.

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I’ve been in bed most of the day. Had my wisdom teeth pulled, been slipping in and out of consciousness. The pain is mostly gone now, and I feel restless, but when I get up to do something I feel dizzy and lie back down.
Luckily I have my iPod. I wrote a short story, hoping to enter it into a contest as soon as I’m able to make the trek to my laptop without falling down. Interestingly, I don’t think I would have written this if I wasn’t in bed.
It’s never impossible to turn things around. I woke up this morning knowing I’d be going in for an operation. I didn’t know I’d write a short story.
Not a bad day at all.